Every Black Friday, I get the same question from brands that don't run a promotion: should we still push spend? Usually, the answer is no. If you don't have an offer, Black Friday is the one week where doing less is the smart move. Here's why, and what to do instead.

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The parking lot

Picture a parking lot with 100 spots and 105 cars that want in. That's a normal day in the ad auction: demand a little ahead of supply. On Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Meta opens more of the lot, say 200 spots, but now 300 cars are fighting to get in. Supply goes up, demand goes up faster, and the price to park spikes.

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Now look at who you're bidding against. The cars winning spots that weekend are waving 30, 40, 50, even 70 percent off. A business-as-usual ad with no offer can't outbid that, and it shouldn't try. You would be paying the highest CPMs of the year to compete in an auction you aren't built to win. If you don't have a deal, you don't need to fight for a spot that week.

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What to do instead

The safest play with no promotion: scale down about 30% heading into the BFCM weekend, then return to your normal budget on the Tuesday after. You can even plan to spend a little less the following week, since there's some buyer and ad fatigue right after the weekend. If you're B2B, that fatigue may not touch you at all, because you're in a different auction than the D2C brands, but a small pullback is still the low-risk call.

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Don't guess, though. Check your own data first. Go back to last year and look at your CPA across the Black Friday weekend. If it held steady, you're fine to stay flat. If it took a hit, scale down this year. There's no prize for spending into a weekend that historically cost you money.

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If you do want an offer

B2B can absolutely run a promotion. Plenty just don't. If you have one that makes sense, go for it, just don't go crazy with budget in your first year. And know that on your first Black Friday, the amount you spend matters less than the quality of your offer. Start from your stable day-to-day budget and increase it 30 to 50 percent, or more if you can comfortably afford it. Treat year one as buying data. It might work so well that you scale it many times over next year, but you need a baseline first. One more thing: look at what your competitors discounted last year. If everyone ran 40% off and you show up with 30%, you'll probably underperform. Match the field or beat it.

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Make it a real deal

Whatever you do, don't fake it. Free shipping on its own is not a deal. A deal needs a minus sign and either a percentage or a dollar amount. "Free shipping" next to the same old price won't move anyone.

And don't play the oldest trick in the book: quietly raising your price a couple of days before, then crossing it out to fake a markdown. Price-tracking tools already exist, and it's only a matter of time before someone points AI at every brand's pricing history the week after Black Friday and publishes who actually discounted and who didn't. That's not PR I would want to deal with.

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The approach I like: show your real price history. Run an ad that flips through the calendar, the same price all year, all year, all year, then the real drop on Cyber Monday. It's honest, and honesty reads as confidence.

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The short version

If you're not running a sale, Black Friday isn't your day to be aggressive, and that's completely fine. Pull back a little, protect your CPA, and save your budget for a week when the auction isn't this crowded. And if you do run an offer, make it a real one. The brands that win that weekend earned their parking spot.

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